The diving float was tucked into the dripping gloom beneath the disused Number Three boat ramp cradle, invisible from the open fairway.
Above their heads, thirty-foot balks of creosoted yellow pine formed a low, slanting ceiling slick with mold and white salt-frost. The patrol cutter swept past seventy yards out in the channel. Its stern lantern cast long, barred shadows through the timber wooden support posts before fading into the fog. The rhythmic thumping of their oars died away toward the Victualing Wharf, leaving only the steady drip of seawater and the rasp of Jarek Thorne’s iron wrench tightening a brass union.
“You have twenty minutes of air in the bellows before the leather warms and loses suction,” Thorne said, not looking up from the two-metal tube hand pump bolted to the float’s timber decking. “And thirty-two feet of water over the silt bed. If you panic down there, you die. If you pull the wrong signal on the line, we haul you up too fast and your lungs tear. Are you still going down?”
Tomas sat on an upturned oak cart hauling tub, his bare legs thrust into the stiff, heavy folds of the vulcanized canvas diving dress. His right forearm throbbed with a persistent, gnawing ache from the battle at the wooden support posts. But his fingers had finally unclenched from their cramp. He rubbed the pale, puckered line of the eel-glass scar, pressing the tendon flat against the bone.
